Rather than arrest burglars, they preferred to go hunting for Pokémon. Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell, two American police officers from Los Angeles, have just been fired.
The case dates back to April 2017, when the two agents, patrolling the streets of the city of California, became addicted to finding Pokémon thanks to the famous mobile game in augmented reality.
A hobby that could almost have gone under the radar, if the two men had not voluntarily decided to ignore a cry for help from their colleagues to intervene in a burglary in a department store.
The tapes of their exchanges in their vehicle at this moment showed that “Agent Mitchell alerted Lozano that Snorlax had just appeared.”
Overwhelming exchanges
The two agents can be heard managing to catch the famous Pokémon known for its prolonged naps, however Togetic, another Pokémon, proved to be much more difficult to capture: “Damn, man, this thing is getting rid of me”, reveal audio recordings.
For about twenty minutes after the call for help, the two policemen talked about Pokémon and preferred to “hunt” these virtual creatures as they drove to different places where the characters presumably appeared on their phones, according to official documents on file. This folder.
Tried at first instance, the two police officers had denied the charges against them and explained that they had only discussed Pokémon Go together, without playing it. The court of appeal, which recently looked into their case, did not believe a single word of this version and confirmed their dismissal at first instance.
